Tag Archives: Internet Explorer

I have been lately working on a collection of home-made widgets based on Dojo. This architecture has been designed to reuse elements and so there are widgets inside widgets, the code is arranged and structured, CSS is imported in a waterfall model, and everything should be fine and working properly.

Until Internet Explorer.

Let’s not talk about its mystic JavaScript errors, DOM random model interpretations and box model hacks. I had heard about the 32 @import CSS statements limit before (here, here and here), but what we were experiencing was different: beyond a given number of nested CSS imports, it seemed like stylesheets stopped being loaded. This was a big WTF the first time we spotted the problem, and blindly fixed it by adding twice the deeper @import sentences into the higher level CSS files. After all, it worked then.

But after a bad night of guilty conscience that issue came back to me, and I decided to do some tests on the issue so that some light be thrown on this dark matter. This was the plan: a simple HTML file with a number of divs (with a border and height definitions to make them visible by default), and a set of CSS files that where imported in waterfall mode, each one of them assigning the background color of one div according to its nesting level. The rupture point would be spotted where div’s started to look blank. Something like this: